Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Meet ranchers Allen Williams, Gabe Brown, and Neil Dennis - their innovative approach to raising livestock is rejuvenating the soil, building drought resilience, and boosting their incomes in the process.

Soil Carbon Cowboys, from Carbon Nation and by filmmaker Peter Byck,travels from North Dakota to Mississippi and Saskatchewan to highlight a new take on the promises and possibilities of soil. These ranchers have moved away from conventional mono-culture practices for livestock grazing, instead adopting new techniques that have tripled the amount of carbon in their soils.

Soil Carbon Cowboys is presented in collaboration with Arizona State University and the World Bank. Visit the Carbon Nation website for film clips and additional information about these innovative solutions to climate change.

Indonesia Enlists Wasps in War on Crop KillerTiny parasitic wasps are neutralizing a pest that threatens to destroy cassava, one of the developing world’s most important staple foods. The wasps are being released in Indonesia, the latest country threatened by the mealybug. Mealybug is a threat to food security in Indonesia, which has one of the region’s highest child malnutrition rates.

Why has 'Microhydro' been Neglected as a Solution to Energy Poverty?Decentralized energy systems, like microhydro power which harnesses the energy of small rivers and streams, improve energy access and help to maximize the relationships between water, energy and food. Currently, agriculture is the largest user of water, and increasing demands for energy also requires increasing use of freshwater.

President Obama announced new tools to strengthen global resilience to climate change, including:

Executive Order on Climate-Resilient International Development: Federal agencies will be required to systematically factor climate-resilience considerations into international development strategies, planning, programming, investments, and related funding decisions, including the planning for and management of overseas facilities.

Releasing Powerful New Data to Enable Planning for Resilience: High resolution global elevation data will be released to enable aid organizations, development banks, and decision-makers in developing countries to better map and plan for climate-driven challenges

Developing New Outlooks for Extreme-Weather Risk: A coordinated US effort, led by NOAA, will develop reliable extreme-weather risk outlooks on time horizons that are currently not available.

Equipping Meteorologists in Developing Nations with the Latest Tools and Knowledge: NOAA will significantly expand the reach of its highly successful international “Training Desk” program, which brings developing-country meteorologists to the United States for state-of-the-art training and education.

Launching a Public-Private Partnership on Climate Data and Information for Resilient Development: Creation of a new public-private partnership to ensure climate data and tools are useful to, and used by, decision-makers in developing countries.

Several multi-stakeholder intiatives launched, most notably the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture. The United States is joining the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture as a founding member. The Alliance is comprised of 16 countries and 37 organizations and was launched to enable 500 million farmers worldwide to practice climate-smart agriculture by 2030.

United States: The US will meet its 17 percent emissions reduction target by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. The US will release a new target next year.

Global Cities: A coalition of urban networks launched the Compact of Mayors, the world’s largest effort to date for cities to accelerate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the impacts of climate change. They will empower cities — which account for 70 percent of the world’s energy-related emissions — to make public and deepen their commitments to GHG reductions, to reaffirm existing targets, and to report on their progress annually.

Country Pledges:Many countries have made pledges and announced initiatives as part of the UN Climate Summit.

Indonesia Palm Oil Pledge: The CEOs of 40 companies, including Cargill, Kellogg, L’Oréal, Nestlé, Mondelez International, Asian Agri, and Wilmar, along with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, among others, signed a pledge to cut the loss of forests in half by 2020 and end it in 2030.

Media coverage and commentary from the UN Climate Summit was extensive - in-depth coverage of the UN Climate Summit is featured in this week's edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief.

Climate change and food and nutritional security are inextricably connected. The ramifications of climate change on agricultural productivity, particularly due to anthropogenic activities, are clear: the time to act is now. This urgency was highlighted by the panelists discussing climate-smart food security at The Chicago Council’s Global Food Security Symposium 2014 in Washington DC. The consensus was that developing countries are likely to be hardest hit by climate change, owing to their vulnerability and lack of resources to respond to its impacts. And while climate change impacts do not affect all regions of the globe simultaneously, the effects in one region are transmitted through supply chains and other avenues to non-affected areas. The 2014 Chicago Council report, Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of a Changing Climate, the 2014 US National Climate Assessment and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report concur on the effects of climate change on agriculture.

The good news, as noted by the US National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, is that we have the means and the capacity to eliminate hunger from the face of the earth; we simply need the will to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. Developing the strategies to respond to climate change – and the willingness to implement them – falls to us. Technological solutions can play a significant role in adaptation and mitigation strategies. For example, open data access and models that capture parameters such as price trends, weather, soil, and animal husbandry can shape strategies to avert a humanitarian crisis by providing opportunity to respond before they happen. Further, based on available data and computational capability we can map out agricultural zones to identify degraded lands that can subsequently be reclaimed back into meaningful production through sustainable interventionsmeans increasing productivity, sequestering carbon, and improving livelihoods.

These kinds of data-driven, holistic agro-based strategies, bundled into climate-smart agriculture, are already in place in many countries and have great potential for fostering economic, social, and environmental sustainability. For instance, USAID’s Feed the Future Initiative has helped smallholder farmers by developing comprehensive, country-led strategies to increase farmers’ productivity, improve access to market, and bolster natural resource management. This approach uses data to define sustainable and workable options for communities, especially those in fragile areas where poverty and malnutrition are on the extremes.

But these innovations are only impactful when they reach their intended consumer. Symposium panelists noted that it often takes too long for technology to infiltrate across the globe. This process could be much more efficient if built on available technology, such as ICT, to accelerate adoption. For example, mobile apps would help farmers make informed choices based on data analyzed and relayed through mobile phones. Cell-phone technology could also help extension services grow beyond beside face-to-face visits, and farmers could pay for inputs using mobile banking services. These possibilities demonstrate the capability of technology and how it can be tapped to improve rural livelihoods, but we must do better to ensure better agricultural innovations reach smallholder farmers.

It is encouraging that many governments – both in developed and developing countries – have already availed data on various parameters for agricultural productivity. We have a collective responsibility to address the impacts of climate change on agricultural production and food security. Through innovative partnerships, interventions, and technology, we can combat the threats from a changing climate.

There is growing consensus that the two issues that will define the lives of future generations are climate change and food security. At this week’s United Nations Climate Summit 2014: Catalyzing Action, world leaders will address both of these challenges and the solutions necessary to minimize their impact on the globe.

The two are increasingly more intertwined and more pressing with each passing year. Climate change has long led to tension-filled debates focused on the “who” and the “why,” distracting us from the problem itself and the solutions necessary to address it.

But new studies and reports, highlighting the effect of climate change on food and nutrition security in the coming decades, are driving a different, less politicized dialogue around this important issue — a step that is critical to embracing the innovation necessary to mitigate its impact.

In a sense, while most of us were not looking, we created the perfect storm — no pun intended. How else do you explain having to feed more than 9 billion people by the middle of the century, while our increasingly volatile weather threatens the food and agriculture that we must rely on to accomplish that goal?

Thursday, September 25, 2014

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new multi-part film series on Roger Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season. Now through October 16—coinciding with World Food Day 2014—we will be releasing two episodes from the series per week. Part 4 is now available below. See all episodes.

It is Africa’s cruelest irony that her hungriest people are her smallholder farmers. For decades, development orthodoxy had prioritized feeding hungry farmers with emergency food aid rather than improving their farming with long-term agriculture development aid so they wouldn’t be hungry in the first place.

Andrew Youn saw this paradox—feeding hungry farmers rather than helping them feed themselves—and he had his own Amua moment. He decided, “We can do better than this.” He established One Acre Fund; rather than hand out food aid, One Acre would provide access to seed, soil nutrients, training, and the financing to pay for it. It shifted the focus from food aid and emergency feeding programs for hunger farmers to creating the conditions for these farmers to be able to grow enough food to feed their families. Youn’s mantra became: affordability, accessibility, training. Reach as many people as you can, have a meaningful impact, and do it cost effectively. He latched on to two other words as well: scalability and sustainability.

In this episode of The Last Hunger Season film series, Andrew Youn talks about the beginning of One Acre Fund, its philosophy (“Farmers First”), and its work with farmers to conquer the hunger season.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

What does climate change have to do with the food on our tables? Just ask farmers in Nicaragua who have lost 2,500 cattle in the worst drought since 1976. Or the dairy and livestock producers in California set to make $203 million loss this year as the state enters its third year of drought.

It is clear that climate change already has a palpable impact on our food supply. Following UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit on September 23, I urge global leaders to recognize the profound difference that investing in agricultural research is already making to those most vulnerable to climate change – the millions of farmers on its front line.

CGIAR scientists, from our dedicated Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, are leading the charge uncovering “climate-smart” innovations that will help these farmers continue to put food on all of our tables. Climate-smart agriculture helps farmers to not only meet targets for production whilst adapting to the challenges that climate change poses, but it also helps farmers lower their own carbon footprint, to minimize future impacts on the environment. This can mean combining indigenous and scientific knowledge to provide 2 million farmers in Senegal with weather forecasts via community radio, so they have a better handle on rainfall patterns. Or, it can mean working with private insurance companies in India to provide a pay out to farmers when rainfall drops below a certain threshold during a growing season.

As temperatures creep up, vital water resources become more and more scarce. As agriculture accounts for around 70% of water use, innovations to save water on the farm will be crucial. In the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, dry seasons are becoming longer, there are more dry spells during rainy seasons and the problem of saline water intruding into fields is getting worse. These trends mean that there is less water available for irrigation than before. Thanks to work spearheaded by the International Rice Research Institute over a thousand rice farmers in the region are successfully using the water-saving technique known as alternate wetting and drying (AWD). This entails farmers monitoring water levels above and below the soil surface and only irrigating when they fall below certain point. As a result, they were able to cut the frequency of irrigation by two-thirds compared to farmers not practicing AWD. They also used 30% less water, and needed to apply less fertilizer and insecticide. Altogether, they made substantial cost savings while at the same time obtaining higher yields.

The rural poor need not only worry about their food supplies, but also their fragile livelihoods that can be destroyed in an instant when extreme weather hits. Research carried out by the Center for International Forestry Research has discovered ways that communities in Indonesia are using forests to protect their homes. Local policies are springing up that ban tree cutting along rivers, so that forests can absorb water deluges. In other communities, profits from wood sales are being put towards repair work after floods have hit.

We heard the UN Secretary-General’s call for bold commitments to catalyse climate action. CGIAR scientists will gather in New York on September 25 for our first-ever “Development Dialogues” to showcase the many concrete solutions for climate action our scientists have been working to uncover. We come to New York with the commitment to dedicated at least 60% of our funding to climate-smart agriculture. We pledge to reach half a billion farmers with climate-smart technologies.

CGIAR is just as ambitious as the UN Secretary-General. We believe we can end hunger and poverty in our lifetimes, and we can do it whilst protecting our planet. It’s just all in the science.

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new multi-part film series on Roger Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season. Now through October 16—coinciding with World Food Day 2014—we will be releasing two episodes from the series per week. Part 3 is now available below. See all episodes.

While struggling through the hunger season, Leonida noticed that some other farmers in western Kenya were doubling or tripling their maize harvest. Curious, she asked for their secret.

They had become members of One Acre Fund, she was told. One Acre was a new social enterprise organization determined to conquer the hunger season by ending the decades-long neglect of smallholder farmers. It hoped to unleash the potential of those farmers by providing access to the essential elements of farming: better quality seeds, soil nutrients, technical training, and the crucial financing to pay for it all.

One Acre Fund farmers come together in groups of eight to 12; friends and neighbors who help each other during the busy times of planting, weeding, harvesting. They give their groups inspirational names like Hope or Faith or Mercy or Grace or Happiness or Success. Leonida and several neighbors formed a One Acre group and called it Amua. In their local language, Amua means “decide.”

What had they decided? Their inspiration came from the Bible, Exodus 3:17.

In this episode of The Last Hunger Season film series, Leonida explains their decision to embark on a modern-day exodus.

During my service in the US Congress I had the opportunity to serve on the House Select Committee on Hunger for its entire life until it was eliminated in 1995.

Although it also was active on domestic hunger and nutrition issues, as I was, my simultaneous membership on the House Foreign Affairs Committee shaped my interest in global agricultural and food security issues. My interest in those subjects was further enhanced during my subsequent leadership of the Asia Foundation, where I saw firsthand the severe undernourishment and related disease problems in large, impoverished parts of Southeast and South Asia.

These experiences, and a greater knowledge of the global food security issues, have motivated me to serve on an advisory panel for The Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Global Agricultural Development Initiative since early 2008. The bipartisan white paper we timely prepared that year was delivered to both the McCain and Obama campaigns. Its primary recommendations began to be put in place early the next year by President Obama, with congressional support, in the form of USAID's Feed the Future program. It was then leveraged internationally through the administration's initiatives at the subsequent G-20 and G-8 summits.

The Chicago Council and the Global Agricultural Development Initiative do not endorse the opinions expressed in this blog, twitter, and facebook but merely provide a forum for this information, commentary, and debate.

The Chicago Council takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the U.S. government. All statements of fact and expressions of opinion on the blog are the sole responsibility of the individual commentator, author, or media source. They may not reflect the views of the Initiative cochairs or funders.